One of the most exciting technologies that build on top of Bitcoin is called Colored Coins and it launched Today with
Coinprism, a web based wallet that brings Colored Coins and the Open Assets open source protocol to life.
Colored Coins allows users to take small fractions of bitcoins and add a secondary value to them. In practice this lets people create new assets and use Bitcoin's network to secure and trade these assets. This simple idea opens up a wide range of possibilities.
For example you can start a company and let Colored Coins represent the ownership of the business. Your investors can trade their Colored Coins representing your business easily as easily as if they were sending bitcoins.
Exchanges can create Colored Coins dollars that will represent real dollars and people will be able to send each other these dollars easily to avoid any possible volatility of Bitcoin. Today sending fiat currencies is expensive, restrictive and/or slow. Soon it will cost as little and will be as fast as sending Bitcoins.
Colored Coins can also represent precious metals, property and can be used for marketing purposes by multinational companies that need a frictionless global currency that works online and in mobile apps.
How does Colored Coins affect Bitcoin?Colored coins make Bitcoin's network and bitcoins themselves more valuable because it adds a significant new functionality.
Widespread use of Colored Coins would have two main effects on Bitcoin:
- Increase in demand for bitcoins, because you have to have BTC in order to manage and send your Colored Coins around.
- Increase the number of small BTC transactions. This will put a pressure on the Bitcoin network, but it will also generate more income in fees for miners.
Read more about Coinprism and receive 1,000 Owl Coins (created with Coinprism) for free.